The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “No. What on earth is it?”

  “There are horses stabled on city park land in some of the outer boroughs. When there’s a 311 complaint, they call and ask us to check the horses for any issues. Health, nutrition, that kind of thing.”

  Jenny was intrigued despite herself. Here was something to take her mind off… everything else! “Cool, can’t wait!”

  “It’s usually nothing,” Becca said. “But O’Dowd knows all these crazy hidden-gem restaurants around the parks so we always end up eating something cool.”

  With Becca, things often came down to food.

  “Well, let’s get out there so we can get back on time!” Jenny led Rufus down the ramp and onto the cobblestones of the parking lot. “Patrol time!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Aside from a text by her mother, letting her know Mister had cleaned up his feed and walked sound this morning, Jenny’s phone had been quiet all day. She wasn’t surprised; after all, she’d deleted all of her social media apps months ago. But she was a little disappointed no one else texted her—not even Lana. She really had abandoned all of her friends, hadn’t she? Aidan hadn’t just been talking sentimental nonsense.

  She was looking at the phone from her seat in the back of the patrol car, considering downloading Twitter again, just to see if any of her old friends were buzzing her account to tell her congrats on the race, or the photoblog, for that matter, when the road dipped and the car swayed a little. She looked up. “Are we on a dirt road?”

  “Yup,” O’Dowd said. “A dirt road in Queens. Real hick country out here.”

  O’Dowd was from upper Manhattan, born and bred Inwood, and had a New York County disdain for the far-flung reaches of the outer boroughs.

  The low dirt road was lined on either side with thick scrubby brush and the remnants of cinder-block and brick walls, as if they were plunging down a post-apocalyptical alley which had once traveled between row houses or apartment buildings. The sky overhead was strangely huge without buildings blocking its view, and the blue sky was being covered over with a high, milky layer of cloud. Jenny had learned to recognize that kind of cloud. It meant they were close to the chilly waters of the ocean. Very close to the ocean.

  Sure enough, the road topped a little rise and for a moment, beyond a low, broken-toothed view of some lone row houses, they glimpsed the dark, island-spotted blue of Jamaica Bay, and beyond that, the Atlantic. An airplane rose over the bay.

  “We’re really close to JFK,” Jenny said, surprised.

  “A lot goes on out here,” O’Dowd said cryptically.

  The road dipped again and then O’Dowd turned the patrol car abruptly, passing through a narrow gateway framed by cinder blocks. They were in a small, weedy farmyard, parking in front of a leaning red barn surrounded by shipping containers. Each metal container had a Dutch door cut in the side, and each Dutch door had a horse’s head peeking over it, watching their arrival with pricked ears.

  Momentarily arrested by the sight, Jenny sat tight in her seat as O’Dowd and Becca climbed out. Becca reached back and opened her door. “What are you doing? Come on.”

  Jenny allowed Becca to tug her out of the car. O’Dowd was already striding towards the shipping containers, a grim look on her face. Jenny expected her to stop at the barn, which appeared to have an office door set to one side, but she passed it entirely and went straight to the first shipping container. She opened the stall door, gently pushing the horse inside back, and disappeared within.

  “What is she doing?”

  Becca sighed. “She hates this place. She likes to make surprise visits and check the horses’ water buckets, see if they have clean stalls, that kind of thing, before anyone can stop her. The guys who run the place can’t stand it, but there’s nothing they can do because the parks department holds the lease and they could terminate it whenever they want.”

  “Why does she hate it?” There was nothing too upsetting about the little property, in Jenny’s eyes. Sure, the old red barn was listing to the left, but there was nothing inside those open doors but a tractor and some stacks of hay. The shipping containers didn’t look like traditional stabling, but the horses surely didn’t mind as long as they had a dry space to lay down and had shelter from the rain and snow. Behind the cluster of containers, there was a small clay arena fenced with gates, western-style, and if it needed some weeding and discing done, that was hardly any different from most of the amateur riding rings to be found anywhere in the country. She’d seen much rougher stabling every single day while driving around Ocala, and no one thought anything of it as long as the horses weren’t skinny. “Who runs this place, anyway?”

  “Ever heard of the Federation of Black Cowboys? I think this is an unofficial offshoot of their group.” Becca lowered her voice; the door on the side of the barn was opening, and an old man in a cowboy hat and wranglers was coming out, his brow furrowed. “That’s Doc Handler. He’s been keeping horses here since the fifties or sixties, something crazy like that. He and O’Dowd do not get along. She doesn’t think you can keep horses in shipping containers. I mean, it’s not exactly a center-aisle barn, but—”

  “Girls!” O’Dowd shouted, coming out of the shipping container. “Grab me that hose and start filling these water buckets!”

  “There’s no call for that,” Doc Handler said irritably. “It’s almost feeding time. I got four guys coming to feed and hay and water these horses.” He had a musical, Caribbean lilt to his words, despite having lived here all of his life, if Becca was to be believed. “Why don’t you take a look at all of them? Not a rib in the lot.”

  “This horse’s water bucket is bone-dry,” O’Dowd retorted. She looked back at Becca and Jenny. “Hose! Now!”

  Jenny wanted nothing more than to climb back into the patrol car and disappear, possibly forever, but she had to tramp over to the hose dangling from the pump next to the barn, cringing under Handler’s disgusted gaze, and start pulling it over to the shipping container. The horse watched her with interest, a few stalks of hay protruding from either side of his mouth. When Jenny leaned over the door to find the bucket, she glanced over the horse and saw that he was fat and shiny, just as Handler had predicted. Not a rib in the lot. What a difference from the horses at the sales lot up north of Saratoga! Imagine if O’Dowd took all that righteous indignation upstate and started outing the real criminals in the equestrian community!

  She unkinked the hose and let the water pour in to the bucket, which had some wet hay at the bottom and looked as if it had been emptied very recently, all the while thinking about the wholesale holy war that O’Dowd could wage with a badge and a few inside tips on where the animal cruelty was really going on.

  O’Dowd, realizing that it only took one person to fill water buckets, had commandeered Becca to check horses with her, and they were going into the containers one by one, presumably looking at hooves and coats and body condition. Handler looked on in the background, his hands in his pockets, his chin a solid granite edifice of concealed rage. Jenny glanced back at him and thought that a photo of the old cowboy, done in black-and-white with the leaning barn behind him and that pale milky sky above, would be a work of art Aidan would have loved to have captured. Was it just yesterday she’d been in the winner’s circle just a few miles from here, champagne on her tongue and Aidan’s camera on her face? What would she give to have that moment back, she realized suddenly, back at the races, back amongst the cheering crowds, surrounded by fast horses and with Aidan’s knowing gaze fastened upon her every move.

  The water swirled in the bucket and overflowed, splashing to the shavings below. She quickly kinked the hose and withdrew it. The horse rubbed his nostrils along her uniform jacket as she pulled back, leaving a little shiny texture on the waterproof fabric.

  One, two, three more containers; she filled half-full buckets while horses nosed appreciatively at her sleeves and nibbled at her wind-blown hair. The barn workers arrived and she could hear them mumbling behind he
r, a buzzing which was quickly contained by Handler, who evidently knew a person could only sit and wait out O’Dowd’s temper tantrums. Jenny tried not to think of Belmont, tried not to think of Aidan, of Lana, of her parents, of Full Stride, of the person she had tried to be and then tried to give up, in equal measure, but there is nothing like barn chores for allowing the mind to dwell, fiercely, on tough problems, and by the fifth shipping container she was just dragging the hose along blindly, not really interested in the horse waiting for her, her mind utterly wrapped up in the question of who she really wanted to be, and who she wanted to be with in the process.

  Then she looked up.

  It was him.

  The bay face looking at her: there was no mistaking him for any other horse. In a sea of bay horses, she would have known him.

  This was the Lawson’s bay gelding.

  He was here. He’d made it to Queens, just as Janice had said. Ames.

  “You made it!” She dropped the hose, planted a kiss on the bay gelding’s nose. Her heart was soaring, tears pricking at her eyes. What a long road they’d both been on this year. What a long, plodding, painful road.

  Then, a funny thought came into her head: she’d never, in all these months of chasing him, figured out his name. She glanced at the piece of duct tape stuck to his shipping container, the handwritten name in black Sharpie.

  Sergeant.

  Jenny burst out laughing. “Well, of course you are,” she told him.

  Then, as she fluffed his black forelock with her hands and dropped a few more kisses on his astonished face, a story blossomed in her mind, and its petals blotted out everything else. She turned away, with a final goodbye pat.

  She had to talk to Handler.

  Leaving the hose spitting out cold water into the thin November grass, she went back to the cluster of men standing near the barn door. Handler looked down at her speculatively, his hat tipped back from his dark eyes. He was grizzled with age, a speckled black-and-white beard close-cropped around his strong jaw, but she could see no hint of weakness in him. This was an old man who would be formidable to the day he died. The men around him stood slightly back, their eyes flicking between her and their boss. He commanded respect. He certainly had hers.

  “Mr. Handler?” She barely managed to keep her voice steady, but she did manage and she was proud of that fact. She was an adult, for one thing, and she was wearing the green uniform of the City of New York, for another. She was still somebody, even if she was an anonymous somebody, at least for a few days more.

  But Handler surprised her. He said, “Jenny Wolfe, what are you doing here?”

  Jenny couldn’t have been more staggered if he’d physically reached out and shoved her. “I—work here? For the parks department, I mean,” she stammered. “I’m an officer. Almost. I mean, I work as an officer but I don’t have a badge.” She stopped. None of this was important to a civilian unless she had backed herself into a corner about writing a summons she couldn’t actually issue, and she had been carefully trained on ways to avoid that kind of situation. So she hadn’t earned her badge yet. So what? She was still here to enforce the rules of the city parks. And Handler still somehow knew her name, in a city where no one else did.

  “I saw you on the backside for a week straight,” Handler said, shaking his head. “I thought you were working for your parents. I don’t know your mother very well, but I knew your father years ago when he was up here, training for Mac Smith.”

  Mac Smith. That had been decades ago, before her parents had been married. A prominent New York trainer, who had passed away before she was born, had taken her father under his wing when he wanted to transition from galloping to training. “You’re a trainer? An owner?”

  “An interested party,” Handler corrected her, chuckling, and the men flanking him chuckled as well. “I like when the racing meet is in the city, because there are no middlemen. When the horses go upstate, it’s tougher. I can’t get up there very often. And horses need help just as bad upstate as they do down here, although some people seem to think they’re all on some sort of vacation during Saratoga month. Horses always need new jobs, even upstate.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following.” Jenny heard footsteps on the grass behind her, and didn’t know if it was O’Dowd or Becca, come to eavesdrop, come to drag her away before she got the story she needed. “But the bay horse down there, Sergeant, in the sixth box—he was at an auction upstate. I saw him—”

  “My man upstate got him for me,” Handler said. “Jay Ames. He finds horses for people who want them. I had a little boy in mind for that horse. I was right. They’ve worked out very well. Now that he’s really settled, I think the boy is going to barrel race him.”

  Barrel racing. Jenny tried not to wince. Just because she thought the horse would have made a lovely hunter, didn’t mean he wouldn’t be just as happy being a barrel racer… sure, galloping around out in tight circles through that deep clay arena… she pushed the idea out of her head. He could have gone to slaughter. This was infinitely better. A shipping container with a bucket of clean water and a few flakes of hay, two square meals a day, and a child to love him: Sergeant was living the dream. Running a cloverleaf pattern probably wouldn’t hurt him.

  “Jenny,” Becca said urgently. “Sergeant O’Dowd wants you to go and see her right now.”

  “I am having a conversation with the property holder,” Jenny said, trying to sound very correct and official. “Tell the sergeant I will be with her in a few moments.”

  Becca paused, astonished, then darted away. No wonder she looked surprised, Jenny thought. How often do I act like I have a spine?

  She turned back to Handler. “Listen, I’m sorry about my boss. I don’t know why she behaves this way. I was in racing and I had no idea you were buying up ex-racehorses who need homes.”

  “With the track right there, I’d be a fool not to do it,” Handler said, grinning. “Where else am I gonna find free or good-as-free horses in the middle of the city? Lots of trainers come to me, they say ‘hey, I got a slow one here, you gotta place for him?’ Sometimes I’m full. But I take what I can. These horses do good here. New York horses are good stock. Well-trained. Conditioned. Our trainers know their shit. I never get no shit horses from Aqueduct or Belmont, that’s a fact.”

  Jenny took a deep breath. “That’s good to know, Mr. Handler. That’s really good to know.” She was tired of thinking about the couple of trainers who had lost their licenses over the auction scandal she’d created. She was tired of believing the worst of her fellow horsemen. Especially when she knew, in her heart, it wasn’t true. They weren’t all criminals. She just happened to have found the ones who were.

  “I know you saw some rough stuff,” Handler said gently. “But that’s what we got Ames for. Nobody’s world is perfect. We got some bad apples out there.”

  “I know.”

  “But lots of good. And so we get these horses. Sometimes maybe we sell them on, they go upstate or something. If they are fancy movers. Once we had a gelding with a smashed-up foreleg. Trainer calls, says we got a problem. I say, no problem. We patch him up, he got better, we see what we got, and I call Christina up in the Bronx. You know that girl? Does dressage? She waits by the phone for me to call, let me tell you! She knows if I call I find her a diamond, cheap. And she gives me what I ask, and now that gelding, he’s competing all over the country. All over the world. And he’s just a throwaway from Aqueduct. No,” he corrected himself. “No one throw that horse away. They call me and say, we know you the right person for this horse. Good guys over there.”

  Jenny stared at the old cowboy, her mind whirring and whizzing at full speed. A story was unfurling itself from his words, an unlikely story of good guys and city kids and urban cowboys and racehorses who were looking for a next step. And even beyond the city: there was still the matter of Jay Ames, watching out from upstate under his Australian hat and oilskin coat—he was part of this story, too. Jenny was itching for a
notebook, a pen, an hour with Handler over coffee and the chance to start taking it all down. For the first time since she’d graduated, since she’d started as a turf writer, she had her story.

  “Mr. Handler, would you be interested in letting me write a story on your ex-racehorses? I can get it onto a really good racing site.”

  Handler looked at her for a moment, considering, then let his gaze flick over her shoulder, where Sergeant O’Dowd was still on her rampage. Jenny knew she was looking for a reason, any reason at all, to shut this place down, send these horses out of the city to the pastures she thought they deserved. O’Dowd did all this with no sense of irony, because she was of the opinion that their own patrol horses deserved better than stalls in the center of the city, too. O’Dowd was good people too. You could believe in different things and still believe in happy horses.

  “You think I don’t know who you are, Jenny Wolfe? I know your website. I know what you’ve been up to.”

  “Then you know it mattered,” she countered. “Those guys had to be caught and called out.”

  Handler grinned. “I’ll let you do it,” he said, “because we need the good press as badly as you racing people do.”

  Jenny swallowed. “I’ll make it happen.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jenny had been typing for an hour and her fingers were starting to get a little sore. She paused and placed her knuckles against the baggie of ice slowly melting on the table next to her laptop. The morning-shift barista of the Bumblebee had recommended it once, months ago, when Jenny had been sitting at this very table typing alongside Aidan, working on the pre-launch details for the site. The barista’s suggestion had been excellent; it was really no different than icing a racehorse’s forelegs after a tough gallop.

  She sighed at the sharpness of cold burning against her sore joints and let her eyes run through the words she’d written. She was trying to tell the story of Handler’s operation through the journey of one horse, the bay Lawson horse, Sergeant—but sometimes the narrative got away from her. She could have written it as a straight column, the way her old stories had been organized, but this was a bigger piece. She thought it might have more impact, get spread further around the internet, if she took careful time with its design and craft.